Richard Branson
From Transformers Wiki
| The name or term "Richard" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see Richard (disambiguation). |
- Richard Branson is a human from the Generation 1 continuity family.
Richard Branson runs a large company called Virgin from the United Kingdom. Their activities involve clean-up operations, which he oversees personally. His intentions are genuine, but he doesn't object to a little publicity along the way, either.
He's smart enough to know that you don't get sharks in the Thames, though Jawbreaker disagreed.
Contents |
Fiction
Marvel The Transformers comics
Following the discovery of Transformer bodies in the Thames, Richard Branson led a crew from Virgin to remove them environmental hazards from London's main waterway, come rain or shine. No sooner had they hauled the bodies of Centurion and Megatron[1] above the water than a team of Decepticons showed up to steal them and fly them back to Shockwave.
Branson appeared cross at the Decepticons as they took the bodies away. In which case he may have had more in mind than simply disposing of them. (Or he just didn't like being put out of a headline.) Salvage!
Notes
- Originally, this story would have featured a character who was merely Bransonesque, but Lee Sullivan had a bit of fun drawing a full-on Branson likeness. When his bosses saw it, they decided to try for permission to actually use Branson as the character. They were successful, with Branson's appearance being tied into his ongoing environmental "Clean Up Britain" campaign, leading to it even making some UK papers. One such article was reprinted in the Titan trade paperback Transformers: Space Pirates, though it wasn't very complimentary about either Branson or Transformers.
- Hachette's 2018 reprint of the story in issue 51 of Transformers: The Definitive G1 Collection saw Richard Branson changed into Mister Johnson, ruining the greatest moment in Transformers history in a scandal known as 'The Branson Pickle'. Lee Sullivan was brought back to redraw Branson's hair and chin. As Simon Furman explains: "In the absence of actual paperwork from those dim distant days proving we had Branson's permission to use his likeness, it was decided to err on the side of caution. I did actually try and contact Branson. But in the end we got Lee Sullivan to make art changes... to his own art."[2]
References
- ↑ Of course, Centurion isn't actually a Transformer, and Megatron wasn't really Megatron but Straxus-as-Megatron at this point.
- ↑ "In the absence of actual paperwork from those dim distant days proving we had Branson's permission to use his likeness, it was decided to err on the side of caution. I did actually try and contact Branson. But in the end we got Lee Sullivan to make art changes... to his own art."—Simon Furman, Twitter, 2018/11/28
